My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (55 page)

For a long time this cardinal problem was denied. The twenty powerful commercial groups that rule over the Israeli economy also ruled over the media and public discourse. But in recent years, a critical awareness has begun to simmer under the surface of Israeli political life. So when Daphne Leef set up camp in Rothschild Boulevard, the nation took notice. And when Itzik Shmuli led the civic uprising, the public responded. After twenty-five years of neoliberal hegemony, a new social-democratic discourse has surfaced. But it is not yet clear if the conceptual revolution of 2011 will become a political reality, whether there is a leadership and a platform that will turn what the new Israelis want into a new Israeli reality.

On both sides of Rothschild Boulevard, expensive new condominium developments and International-style buildings are illuminated from below with spotlights. Israeli affluence is still very much on display. Market forces have not waned. Along the central promenade, young men wander in torn jeans; end-of-the-night clubbers look on with chemically induced gleams in their eyes; a beautiful girl rides her fashionable bike. As dawn approaches and the boulevard empties, I try to weigh success and failure, risk and reward, hope and despair. And it seems to me now that many of our virtues and many of our flaws come from the very same source. The very same gene that makes us also endangers us.

The secret of Israeli high-tech is bucking authority, ignoring conventional wisdom, and flouting the rules of the game. The weakness of the Israeli state is bucking authority, ignoring conventional wisdom, and flouting the rules of the game. The Jewish Talmudist, the Jewish merchant, the Jewish anarchist, and the Jewish immigrant gave birth to a restless Israeli citizen. This unpredictable citizen creates an unbridled energy that doesn’t allow the state to function as a sovereign body. Ben Gurion’s bureaucratic tyranny harnessed this energy for half a century and founded a state. But after Ben Gurion’s death in 1973, the state he
forged began to disintegrate. It could no longer rule over its tribes and sects and individuals. It could no longer contain its diversified minorities and contradicting identities. The body politic stopped dealing with Israel’s real challenges and stopped acting rationally. Instead of being a commando boat advancing toward its target, Israel became a captainless pleasure ship lost at sea with no compass and no sense of direction.

What happened here, on Rothschild Boulevard in the summer of 2011, was a wake-up call. Afraid of losing their nation-state, the Israelis tried to reclaim it. As a new day rises over the old Tel Aviv museum building at the end of the boulevard, where Ben Gurion called the Israeli state into being, I so wish the wake-up call will truly awaken us. It’s high time. This start-up nation must restart itself. This immature political entity must grow up. Out of disintegration and despair we must rise to the challenge of the most ambitious project of all: nation rebuilding. The resurrection of the Israeli republic.

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photo credit 16.1
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I
FIRST PERCEIVED THE THREAT POSED BY
I
RAN IN
2002. A
T THE TIME, A
fierce debate was raging in America concerning whether to invade Iraq. At the time, Israel was struggling to thwart the suicide bombing offensive of the second intifada. But like a few other Israelis, I realized that the regional power America must endeavor to restrain was not Iraq but Iran. The real existential threat Israel was facing was not Palestinian but Iranian. If Iran went nuclear, the Middle East would go nuclear, the world order would collapse, and Israel’s existence would be in jeopardy.

Three years later I began to write about Iran in an intensive, almost obsessive manner. But even in 2006, 2007, and 2008, few listened to me as I wrote about the whirling centrifuges enriching uranium in Iran. Only a few agreed that the Iranian nuclear challenge was the most dramatic Israel had faced since its founding. To me the task seemed clear: the international community and the State of Israel had to act swiftly so that they would not soon face the horrific dilemma of (an Iranian) bomb or (an Israeli) bombing. But both at work and at home, many regarded me as an alarmist spreading fear and anxiety for no good reason. The prominent Israelis I am surrounded by and the Israeli media I work for paid lip service to Iran but refused to grasp Iran. So did the international community and the international media. Although it was known
that the Iranian threat was there—and getting closer—few acknowledged it, and still fewer tried in earnest to do what had to be done to fend it off.

The Iranian nuclear challenge has a global context. Since 1945, the international community has managed to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons in an impressive way. But if Iran goes nuclear it will bring about a nuclear globalization that might eventually endanger the post-Nagasaki miracle.

The Iranian nuclear challenge has an American context, too. After invading Iraq and after retreating from Iraq, the United States is perceived in the Middle East as a declining power. After it lost some of its old Arab allies due to the Arab awakening, America’s influence in the Arab world is waning. If Washington loses the strategic battle against Tehran, it might lose whatever respect it still has in the Middle East. A nuclear Iran will become the new dominant power in a crucial part of the world and would turn it against the American Empire.

The Iranian nuclear challenge also has an Israeli context. True, Israel is said to be a nuclear power. But Israel has never taken advantage of its unique weapon. Although it is constantly threatened by its neighbors, it has never threatened to wipe them out. In the nuclear sphere, Israel has acted in an admirably responsible and restrained manner. Iran is different. Its ayatollahs seek regional hegemony and want to see Israel decimated. If they acquire the bomb they might actually use it or pass it on to others who might do so. A nuclear Iran will force Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to go nuclear and will surround the Jewish state with an unstable multipolar nuclear system that will make its strategic positioning impossible and will turn the life of its citizens to an ongoing nightmare.

And yet, although the three contexts were known and acknowledged, both the West and Israel were dormant regarding Iran for many years. The problem was not ideological or moral but cognitive. There were no good guys and bad guys vis-à-vis the uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz and Fordow—there were only those who saw and those who were blind. In the early 2000s, it should have been crystal clear that Israel’s number one mission was to do everything in its power not to reach the bomb-or-bombing juncture. But Israel failed to address
the Iranian challenge seriously. The strategic establishment and the intelligence community dealt with it, but the public at large ignored it. As it had no immediate consequences and no tangible costs, the threat remained abstract and vague. It did not become part of the political debate or public discourse. It had no real place in our real lives. A mental block would not let us see Iran clearly, and it cost us a crucial decade in which Iran could have been stopped without the use of force.

The cognitive block did not blind only Israel. By 2005, all Western intelligence agencies were cognizant of the Iranian nuclear program. All Western leaders knew that Iran might endanger the future of the United States, Europe, and the world. But Western public opinion was incapable of addressing the challenge, psychologically or conceptually. Preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Western media, academia, and intelligentsia turned their backs on the Iranian challenge. Many wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t see, and wouldn’t comprehend. That’s why the West’s leaders did not have the necessary political backing needed to act decisively against Iran. Since the issue was not a tomorrow morning issue, dealing with it was glossed over and postponed. Crippling sanctions were not imposed in time. A deal with Russia, which would have put Iran under a real economic embargo, was not struck. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was not confronted with a credible ultimatum: (military) nuclearization or (political) survival. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Tehran encountered a weak and distracted West that would not impede its race to the bomb.

The Israeli cognitive block and the West’s cognitive block had a lot in common. Both were the outcomes of strategic success and stability. For forty years, Israelis had been leading reasonably good lives under the umbrella of Dimona, and they had begun taking for granted Israel’s strategic regional monopoly. They were not fully aware of the appalling consequences of the possible end of this monopoly, or simply refused to imagine them. True, there were two Gulf wars, two Lebanon wars, and two Palestinian uprisings—but these did not threaten the existence of Israel. And as existence was not threatened, complacency increased. Israelis were no longer aware of how lucky they were and what might happen to them once the Dimona monopoly was broken.

For seven decades Americans and Europeans had been living a life
of peace and plenty thanks to the safety net of Western strategic superiority. Consequently, they, too, took this superiority for granted, unaware of the fact that the appearance of a radical Islam nuclear threat would directly affect the good life of Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. True, during this period of time there was a Korean war, a Vietnam war, and the Bush wars, but apart from the Cuban missile crisis (in 1962) there was nothing that exposed the United States and Europe to a real nuclear threat. As strategic stability was not really challenged, their complacency increased. Americans and Europeans were no longer aware of how lucky they were and what might happen to them once ayatollahs or Islamist terrorists intimidated their sheltered way of life and their pursuit of happiness.

The Iranian nuclear project was like a baobab tree. In the early stages of its growth, it would have been easy to uproot. Iran was no match for Western might. But in the early stages of its growth there was no serious attempt to uproot it. Because of the gap between Iranian tenacity and Israeli and Western complacency, the Iranians had the upper hand. The United States got entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of focusing on Iran. Israel dealt with settlements rather than centrifuges. Because of its internal weaknesses, Europe was paralyzed. Both the West and Israel saw the terrifying tree of a nuclear Iran grow in front of their eyes but did not fell it.

I meet Amos Yadlin in his pleasant Karmei Yosef home, east of Tel Aviv. The view from the balcony is astounding: the Tel Aviv skyline, the Mediterranean coastline, Rehovot’s white urban sprawl, Hulda’s gray-green vineyards, the archaeological site of Tel Gezer. Some five hundred yards from the garden fence, on Gezer’s slope, are well-tended orchards where once stood the Palestinian village of Abu Shusha and the stately home in which my great-grandfather settled in the 1920s.

In 1981, Major Yadlin was one of the eight Israeli pilots who bombed Osirak, the French-built Iraqi nuclear reactor. In 2007, as chief of military intelligence, General Yadlin was the man in charge of collecting intelligence on the North Korean–built Syrian nuclear reactor in Deir ez Zor. Between 2006 and 2010, Yadlin played a central role in Israeli operations against the Iranian nuclear project. He was not the one to
conceptualize the Begin Doctrine, according to which Israel will not allow any enemy nation to acquire a nuclear weapon, but he was one of its leading soldiers. Twice he managed to implement the doctrine in an extraordinary manner, while his third attempt was rather less successful. So here I sit, in a garden chair, listening closely to the round-faced, thoughtful Israeli general who, time after time, happened to be in the place where history was decided.

First Yadlin tells me about his childhood in Kibbutz Hatzerim in the Negev, where the pioneering farmers struggled to work the salt-streaked soil and eventually triumphed over it. The socialist Zionism that raised him and shaped him in the 1950s was moderate and humane; its primary goal was to conquer the desert and to make a home in the desert for the Jewish people. Then Yadlin tells me about his early years in the Israeli Air Force. He was proud in the early 1970s to belong to this most professional and efficient Israeli organization, which secured the existence of the Jewish national home. Then Yadlin tells me about the eighteen traumatic days and nights of the Yom Kippur War: seven of his fellow pilots died and five were captured, while his squadron lost seventeen of its thirty Skyhawk bombers. As war raged all around him, Yadlin learned to steel himself and regain confidence in himself. In the years of recovery that followed 1973, the IAF did the same. When Yadlin returned from training in Utah in the summer of 1980 as one of the first pilots of Israel’s first F-16 squadron, both he and his peers felt a renewed sense of strength.

The 1981 mission seemed impossible: to bomb the nuclear reactor the French were building for the Iraqis on the outskirts of Baghdad. On the face of it, Baghdad was too far away and the Israeli Air Force did not have the technological capabilities required for such a mission. There was no GPS yet, no smart bombs, no airborne refueling. There was no precedent, either: no air force in the world had ever bombed a nuclear reactor. And yet, on June 7, 1981, at 1600 hours, eight state-of-the-art F-16 bombers took off over the Gulf of Eilat and crossed, at low altitude, six hundred miles of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. They covered mountains, deserts, the Euphrates Valley, the Euphrates River; plateaus, water canals, railways, houses, fields. Some Iraqi citizens, unaware of what was going on, waved to the pilots flying so low over their roofs. And then, after 103 minutes of flight, Yadlin ascended from five hundred feet to
ten thousand feet in twenty seconds. He could now see the reactor’s dome, and five seconds later the reactor itself was within the bomber sights. After another ten seconds the young kibbutznik pushed the button, releasing two two-thousand-pound bombs. Twenty seconds later he made a quick descent into the plumes of smoke from the erupting antiaircraft missiles, dropping to five hundred feet again, and escaped home over the darkening deserts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Sitting in the cockpit, Yadlin knew that mission impossible was accomplished. One meticulous minute over the target had removed the threat of a second Holocaust.